IBM Bridges ISV, VAR Relationships

“It’s a way for infrastructure partners to focus on small ISVs who might not care about hardware, but they can drive hardware demand,” said Towney Kennard, vice president of business partners for IBM Americas.

The designation enables ISVs to keep more control of the end-user relationship and helps VARs drive more revenue, said Eric Williams, executive vice president of the IBM Group at Arrow Electronics’ Enterprise Computing Solutions arm.

Before the new designation, the reseller--not the ISV--had to sell the hardware to the end user, he said.

“ISVs still want the central interface with the end user, particularly around billing. IBM’s policy did not allow the partner to do that. This is a very large opportunity. It has been a key inhibitor to driving ISV and [solution provider] relationships. Now there’s a real bridge across those two,” Williams said. “Our plan is full steam ahead on these relationships.

Under the old model, ISVs could not sell the hardware directly to end users without proper certifications. Now they can leverage the solution providers for proper certifications, said Mike Nowlan, director of marketing at Arrow’s IBM Group.

“If you became a reseller of IBM, it required sales and technical certifications. Now IBM is saying that ISVs may not want that,” Nowlan said. “They can choose a tier-two reseller to hold the certification for the project and to act as that support mechanism to ensure the infrastructure gets deployed correctly.”